The Practice of Art

1. I watched a 1992 documentary about Joan Mitchell last night and this morning. She was one of the New York abstract expressionists who came up in the years following World War II. She painted large canvases brimming with color, dancey and bold, emphatic, surrounded mostly by men whose work got a lot more attention than hers did, but she kept painting. She lived in France for a good deal of her life after the NYC years. In the film, there's a section of an interview with Mitchell conducted by a French art critic. Again and again, with what seems to me to be an obsequious, disingenuous smile, he pushes her to answer questions about the meaning of her work. Again and again she doesn't answer him, except to say the art is the art, the painting is the painting, it is what it is. How moving that this woman, sixty-seven at the time the film was released and dead before the year was out, was so clear and unshakable about her experience of painting, which sounded like samadhi to me--no painter, no painting, no separation.

2. I'm watching "Word is Out," a 1977 documentary about the lives of a couple dozen gay men and lesbians, among them poet Elsa Gidlow. In a scene at a kitchen table with three or four other women, she explains how she views the filmmakers--as wanting to pigeon hole her, because it fulfills the demands of their film. She uses the analogy of writing a novel; the novelist uses her characters to fulfill the demands of her story. Not where I come from. I have to get out of the way and let my characters tell the story, since I certainly don't know what it is. And if I can't hear a character speak truthfully, then no story follows. Again and again, I have to get out of the way in this exercise in non-attachment.

3. Some years ago, when Francis was without a studio, I offered to sit for him so he could draw. Out of about a dozen meetings came a couple of dozen drawings. About the best of them, Francis said he'd exercised over them no control whatsoever--and this is a skilled draftsman, an artist whose sculptural work requires great precision. These best drawings came, he said, out of not knowing, having no idea--no idea about how he was going to respond to the figure in front of him, and no thought or feeling about having no idea.

4. I once asked my yoga teacher Dave if there was a difference between the OHM we chant three times at the beginning of class and the ones we chant at the end. Yes, there is, he said. The chanting at the end of class is unobstructed. Some part of the obstacles of containment, holding, tension have been released so the sound can come out full voiced, ore rotundo. Between the breath and posture, pranayama and asana, the ego that produces those obstacles releases its grip on the body. (Ana, I'd love for you to weigh in here.)

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Day 20 is almost over. This night my days are diminished by one.

I have only the stitches of the pine branch to put into the mineki of my rakusu and then the sewing will be finished. I put it on this afternoon so Jane and Patty could measure the straps. It feels substantial. I want to wear it. Here is the verse we recite before we dress ourselves in these robes of the Buddha in miniature:

Great robe of liberation
Field far beyond form and emptiness
Wearing the Tathagatha's teaching
Saving all beings

Oh, practice. Oh, art. Oh, life which grows shorter with each passing day.